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Thursday, 29 July 2010

Outpost (2008)

This British film tells a rather familiar story with a few new twists. A group of hard-bitten mercenaries are recruited by a mysterious client to go into a danger zone to find Something Of Value. So far, so predicable. But I didn't fall asleep, because there's enough going on here to satisfy my jaded cinematic palate.

For a start, the group of mercenaries is led by a fairly convincing Ray Stevenson. The client is the excellent 'posh Brit' actor Julian Wadham. And the mercenaries aren't too bad, including as they do among their ranks the bloke who played Tyres in Spaced. Also, the setting - a big forest, basically - is supposed to be in a European war zone that nobody calls Bosnia. So that allows them to bring in - ta da - Nazis.

The team's destination is a Waffen SS bunker that was being used for experiments that were, unsurprisingly, pretty vile. The client's sponsors want one vital component of the Evil Nazi Plan - a machine that somehow exploits a Unified Field Theory. Unfortunately, what the SS were using the thing for was to create - well, I won't spoil it all. But the resulting mayhem is fairly satisfying.

Major flaws in the film are that the forces of evil are (as so often happens) more than a mite inconsistent. Either monsters can move through solid matter or they can't. It's not helpful if they are ghosts one minute and zombies the next. Also, the ending is curiously flat, as if - having come up with a good central idea - the script guys were a bit stuck. But with these reservations, Outpost isn't bad. It's not excessively gory, either, as one imdb reviewer points out.